Informal gold mining and mercury pollution in Brazil

The Amazon region has been responsible for a major share of Brazilian gold production in recent years. The region has witnessed a sizable gold rush comparable only to the California gold rush last century. The gold rush has spawned a powerful informal mining sector and has attracted many people - some who have come to the region in search of wealth and some who were already there but were displaced from other, unsuccessful economicactivities. What these people encounter at the mining sites are dreadful living and working conditions. Gold mining also causes substantial environmental problems, which may persist whether gold deposits do or not. The author discusses the environmental effects of gold mining in the region, focusing on mercury pollution. Mercury, an important input in gold extraction, is being discharged into the atmosphere and the rivers at alarming rates. The environmental costs of the present extraction, is being discharged into the atmosphere and the rivers at alarming rates. The environmental costs of the present extraction technology will be faced primarily by future generations, because of natural chemical processes. Although removing the mercury already discharged from the Amazonian environment may be an enormous task, at least future discharges should be curtailed through the use of appropriate technology, environmental education, and a combination of command and control measures and market-based incentives. The author describes the gold extraction process and the extent of mercury use and contamination. He analyzes key elements of the environmental problem, especially the informal miner and the fish economy. Finally, he suggests a combination of command and control regulations and market-based incentives adapted to the informal gold mining economic environment. He emphasizes the need for an education campaign about the perils of using mercury and the availability of more appropriate, and inexpensive, alternative extraction technologies.Mining&Extractive Industry (Non-Energy),Montreal Protocol,Water and Industry,Coastal and Marine Resources,Primary Metals

Beyond the Boom: Ensuring Adequate Payment for Mineral Wealth Extraction

Examines Ohio's severance tax rate and receipts on gas and oil extraction compared with other states, oil and gas production's costs to the state, and potential impact of a higher tax. Recommends raising the tax and creating a severance tax trust fund

More about Herbert Hoover

Pennington writing about the history of his relationship with Herbert Hoover.https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/levi_pennington/1284/thumbnail.jp

The Use of Catastrophe Bonds as a Means of Economic Development in Emerging Economies

Catastrophe bonds offer a way for entities located in natural disaster prone regions to safely and efficiently transfer the risk of insuring property to the financial markets and subsequently, create a financially attractive environment for insurers and investors. The opportunity for investors to utilize modeled loss analytical platforms such as those created by AIR, Risk Management Solutions, and EQECAT, could be used to bridge the growing gap in emerging economies between economic losses created by natural disasters and insured losses. Bridging this insurance gap in emerging economies could have positive global implications for the insurance industry, global trade, foreign direct investment, and the average humanitarian aid spent on natural disaster recovery and resistance. Apart from the additional profits that could be generated from increased underwriting in emerging economies, introducing catastrophe and property insurance to emerging economies could create a road map for other emerging economies who are struggling to balance economic development with disaster financing. Experience from sovereigns which have experimented with this method of risk transfer, such as Haiti and Mexico offer a basis for understanding the advantages and difficulties associated with developing a country specific modeled loss analytical platform for measuring natural hazard risks

Religious Motivation for Mitigating Human-forced Climate Change: Scientifically Informed, Politically Astute, and Collaborative

Purpose – Religious organizations are among the non-government groups in the USA that are addressing climate change phenomena from their various faith perspectives and, despite the differences in their traditions and practices, are collaborating with one another to achieve their mutual goal – the establishment of policies that will mitigate the real and anticipated perils scientists are forecasting. If sufficiently motivated by their faith, informed by climate science, and politically astute, these groups may be reliable allies for climate change decision-makers to tap as they strive to achieve their mutual goal. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Focusing on the Coalition on Environment and Jewish Life, the Catholic Coalition on Climate Change, and Interfaith Power and Light, the author explores the diverse religious faith-based motivations underpinning their efforts, the extent to which they remain cognizant of the latest climate science, the structures through which they share their particular faith perspectives and collaborate with one another, and their efforts to reach decision makers at various levels of governance. Findings – Motivated by their religious faiths, these three organizations demonstrate that they are scientifically informed, politically astute, and collaborative with others in striving to achieve their mutual goal of mitigating the adverse effects of climate change locally to globally. Research limitations/implications – The three groups on which the author focuses are based in the USA and collaborate with one another. In an earlier presentation prepared for an international conference, the author included two other groups outside the USA, but manuscript length precluded their inclusion in this submission. Perhaps the author\u27s limited study will stimulate scholars to explore other groups in various parts of the world. Practical implications – To assure and strengthen the momentum already underway, scholars of religions need to probe their foundations for responding to climate change, leaders of religious communities must heighten their efforts to educate their followers accordingly, adherents of religions must be open to embracing their motivating traditions, and religiously based groups must seek to collaborate with one another at various bioregional and political levels to demand actions that will advance a life-sustaining climate. Originality/value – The author is unaware of studies exploring these three groups using the methodology the author employs for the purposes of describing and assessing the effectiveness of religious groups in addressing human-forced climate change

Promises and Perils of Mining Software Package Ecosystem Data

The use of third-party packages is becoming increasingly popular and has led to the emergence of large software package ecosystems with a maze of inter-dependencies. Since the reliance on these ecosystems enables developers to reduce development effort and increase productivity, it has attracted the interest of researchers: understanding the infrastructure and dynamics of package ecosystems has given rise to approaches for better code reuse, automated updates, and the avoidance of vulnerabilities, to name a few examples. But the reality of these ecosystems also poses challenges to software engineering researchers, such as: How do we obtain the complete network of dependencies along with the corresponding versioning information? What are the boundaries of these package ecosystems? How do we consistently detect dependencies that are declared but not used? How do we consistently identify developers within a package ecosystem? How much of the ecosystem do we need to understand to analyse a single component? How well do our approaches generalise across different programming languages and package ecosystems? In this chapter, we review promises and perils of mining the rich data related to software package ecosystems available to software engineering researchers.Comment: Submitted as a Book Chapte

The Cane toad times presents energy issues

The Cane Toad Times was a satirical magazine, published in Brisbane. It was published over two periods. In the first period in the 1970s, 7 issues were produced. In the second period between 1983 and 1990, 15 issues were produced. In 1986 the company ToadShow evolved from the Cane Toad Times. This special edition of The Cane Toad Times is being published, as the Uranium Producers’ forum would say, in the public interest. The articles in it contain the most up-to-date and wide ranging information on the perils of a committment ot the mining and export of uranium. It also contains information on energy alternatives

Bitcoin: the wrong implementation of the right idea at the right time

This paper is a study into some of the regulatory implications of cryptocurrencies using the CAMPO research framework (Context, Actors, Methods, Methods, Practice, Outcomes). We explain in CAMPO format why virtual currencies are of interest, how self-regulation has failed, and what useful lessons can be learned. We are hopeful that the full paper will produce useful and semi-permanent findings into the usefulness of virtual currencies in general, block chains as a means of mining currency, and the profundity of current ‘media darling’ currency Bitcoin as compared with the development of block chain generator Ethereum. While virtual currencies can play a role in creating better trading conditions in virtual communities, despite the risks of non-sovereign issuance and therefore only regulation by code (Brown/Marsden 2013), the methodology used poses significant challenges to researching this ‘community’, if BitCoin can even be said to have created a single community, as opposed to enabling an alternate method of exchange for potentially all virtual community transactions. First, BitCoin users have transparency of ownership but anonymity in many transactions, necessary for libertarians or outright criminals in such illicit markets as #SilkRoad. Studying community dynamics is therefore made much more difficult than even such pseudonymous or avatar based communities as Habbo Hotel, World of Warcraft or SecondLife. The ethical implications of studying such communities raise similar problems as those of Tor, Anonymous, Lulzsec and other anonymous hacker communities. Second, the journalistic accounts of BitCoin markets are subject to sensationalism, hype and inaccuracy, even more so than in the earlier hype cycle for SecondLife, exacerbated by the first issue of anonymity. Third, the virtual currency area is subject to slowly emerging regulation by financial authorities and police forces, which appears to be driving much of the early adopter community ‘underground’. Thus, the community in 2016 may not bear much resemblance to that in 2012. Fourth, there has been relatively little academic empirical study of the community, or indeed of virtual currencies in general, until relatively recently. Fifth, the dynamism of the virtual currency environment in the face of the deepening mistrust of the financial system after the 2008 crisis is such that any research conclusions must by their nature be provisional and transient. All these challenges, particularly the final three, also raise the motivation for research – an alternative financial system which is separated from the real-world sovereign and which can use code regulation with limited enforcement from offline policing, both returns the study to the libertarian self-regulated environment of early 1990s MUDs, and offers a tantalising prospect of a tool to evade the perils of ‘private profit, socialized risk’ which existing large financial institutions created in the 2008-12 disaster. The need for further research into virtual currencies based on blockchain mining, and for their usage by virtual communities, is thus pressing and should motivate researchers to solve the many problems in methodology for exploring such an environment